Is your Appointment Book filled with several years’ worth of past appointments and events? And does your Unscheduled List contain hundreds of patients, most of whom will never be rescheduled? This outdated information can clutter search results and hinder your work, especially when you’re trying to schedule appointments. So, what should you do with this outdated information? Dentrix offers a method to purge old appointments (and events) manually; or, you can set up a time to automatically purge them regularly.
Watch this video to learn how to purge scheduled and unscheduled appointments from Dentrix. (Duration 1:43)
Additional Tips
- Purging appointments permanently removes previously scheduled appointments, events, and Pinboard appointments from the Appointment Book. However, purging appointments does not remove the appointment history from the patient’s Ledger or Chart.
- When an appointment is purged, the Office Journal records the original date, time, reason, and provider for the purged appointment. Therefore, you can view old, purged appointments only in the Office Journal.
- Purging unscheduled appointments removes previously Broken, Wait/Will Call, and Pinboard appointments from the Unscheduled List.
- You can also purge appointments (and events) from the Appointment Book. To do so, review the Dentrix Help file, Purging Appointments. As this is a simplified method for purging appointments, which can be performed periodically, it’s recommended that you create an automatic task in the Reports and Task Scheduler to purge appointments on a more regular basis.
- You can also access the Reports and Tasks Scheduler from the Office Manager. Open the manager and click Maintenance > Task Scheduler(Month End)….
- To learn more about purging appointments and events from the Reports and Task Scheduler, read Running Reports or Tasks Now and Adding Reports or Tasks to a Queue in Dentrix Help.
Check Your Knowledge
If you have access to Dentrix, check your knowledge with this exercise.
- Switch to the Dentrix demo database.
(Skip this step if you are using the Dentrix Learning Edition software.) - Purge all scheduled and unscheduled appointments older than two years.
- Add “Purge Appointments” and “Purge Unscheduled Appointments” as yearly tasks.